Sunday, 31 January 2016

The fifth and final episode of our podcast The Crime Vault Live is now up. You can download or listen to it (and the previous four editions) at The Crime Vault website here or at ITunes here. It's a great listen, our guest is Alex Marwood, who's a fascinating interview; it helps that her novel The Darkest Secret is a definite winner. The reviews include new novels by Robert Crais, Chris Brookmyre and Gerry Seymour; discussion of lots of film and TV; the genre's game-changers; the passing of one of those game-changers, William McIlvanney, and the year's best-seller list and its domination by women crime writers. All killer and no filler.

Sadly, this will be the last in this series of Crime Vault Live podcasts, as Little Brown's Crime Vault website hasn't renewed our commission. They have been great to work with, from the moment Harry da Producer and I first discussed the idea with Mark Billingham; as Mark's publishers they were very supportive and we owe them a lot of thanks, especially the energetic Alexandra Cooper who was our point person at LB. I'm sure LB will continue to offer audio at the Crime Vault, so keep your eyes on the website. Meanwhile Harry and I will look to take the format elsewhere, because the response from many of you has been great, and the magazine-style format is one I hope we can continue, so keep your ears to the ground.

In the meantime, the upside will be more reviews up here on Irresistible Targets; in fact I may have to revisit some of the things we talked about in the five episodes of the podcast, just for those of you who didn't listen.

Signe Toly Anderson, the original 'girl singer' (see below) from the Jefferson Airplane, died Thursday, the same day as her bandmate Paul Kantner, though inevitably her death received less attention. Anderson (Toly was her maiden name) sang on the Airplane's first record Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, which is a remarkably good album. It's not quite the same sound as Surrealistic Pillow, which followed with Grace Slick on vocals. Slick's lead vocals were a big part of what made the Airplane, and especially 'Somebody To Love', so much of a hit, but with Anderson the band did more intricate harmonies and her voice blended in beautifully with Marty Balin's and Kantner's and Skip Spence's (in the early days). Although there was more blues and folk in that album, it was as much a foundation of the San Francisco sound as the record which followed; less psychedelic but I loved it when it first came out, and it's worth a listen now. If you find the version with extra songs not included, and a couple of 'uncut' versions, you'll hear more and better Signe.

Anderson left the band because she had a young daughter, and wanted to quit the road. She tells a great story about a trip to Chicago with the Airplane, you can link to that interview here, it's a great listen. The airplane were the house band at the Matrix, where he husband was the bartender, and the first night they played word of mouth reached Ralph Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle. Gleason came the very next night, wrote about them, and the rest was history. Gleason would go on to the same thing nationwide in his Rolling Stone column for many musicians. It's a shame that era of cross-generational fertilization via newspapers doesn't really exist any more.

Anderson arranged her leaving with time enough for the Airplane to hire Slick, and for Bill Graham, who was also their manager, to make arrangements; they did their last concert with her on October 15, 1966 at the
Fillmore; Slick took over the very next night. Apparently a tape of that
concert surfaced and became a CD in 2010, it includes Balin announcing
that 'the girl singer' was leaving the band. I found her signature song 'Chauffeur Blues' from that concert on You Tube, you can link to that here. The sound's not great, but her voice rises above that, and you can hear Jorma and Jack clearly around that voice.

She survived cancer in the 1970s, but it had returned well before the time she did the interview. I was still listening as wrote this, and she's incredibly positive. You can see why her bandmates loved her so much. She ends by telling the interviewer 'Hey, just be happy. Remember...everything you say there's someone listening. Make sure it's nice...it's gentle. And love the people you love because, you know, it might just be the blink of an eye'. The blink of a very teary eye now.

Friday, 29 January 2016

I came to Britain 39 years ago, in January 1977. Over the period of a week in May that year I wrote the poem below. In December I sent it to the Arts Council of Great Britain, for their New Poetry anthology. It was accepted and published in New Poetry 4, in November 1978. The anthology was edited by Anthony Thwaite and Fleur Adcock; from their response to me at the launch cocktail party, I suspected it was Fleur, who asked me about my (non-existent) military career, who had selected my poem. She was the first New Zealander I had ever met. She was also very encouraging, and I left the event feeling I'd turned a writing corner.Being me, I was never able to parlay that feeling and an appearance in a major anthology (other contributors included John Mole, Gavin Ewart, Anne Stevenson, Roy Fuller, CH Sisson, Peter Redgrove, George Mackay Brown, TV's Tom Paulin and many other established names) into anything bigger. The networking was likely going on around me. And I was very happy with the £15 fee and copy of the book published by Hutchinson, which I rediscovered in a file cabinet while moving this year.

The poem eventually found its way into a small collection called Neutron Bomb, published in an American magazine called Tel Let, in Illinois. Looking at it now, it's very much atypical of what I was writing at the time. In fact it's kind of a coda to my first-ever published poem, which appeared in the New Haven Register when I was 17. I've made a couple of small changes; 40 years on I suppose I'm allowed to try that. One of them is adding the formality of capitalizing the start of each line.

BASIC TRAINING

Thus we innocents, who had never before
Seen so close a war, found ourselves
In trees, dangling upside-down to test

If our helmets would hold to our heads,
If we too could hang on. And in our eyes
The trees angled down from a ceiling

Of earth, not falling, but threatening
The sky, busy pouring itself out of
The picture. Only the pressure of our

Insteps on bark alerted us to
The presence of fantasy. And only
The chin straps sliding down to our throats

Cued gravity to drop us, one by one; leaves
Somersaulting to ground, where we stood
Exultant, dizzy, in strange erect forms,

Gravity realigning the world in our eyes,
The proper sight of those fallen men
Unharmed by a distant vision of war.

Wednesday, 27 January 2016

At their best
Stephen Hunter's novels of Earl Swagger, and then Bob Lee Swagger,
have been grounded in a sort of historical realism, with the Swaggers
playing hard-jawed stoic heroes. Sometimes, less successfully,
they've borrowed tropes that reminded us of Hunter's other career as
a film critic, specialising in violence. Occasionally, Hunter can
seem like a small-calibre Tom Clancy, with his obsessive detail about
ballistics.

Sniper's Honor
combines elements of all three facets of Hunter's work, for better or
worse. Much of it tells the story of a Russian woman sniper, called
the White Witch by the German soldiers she torments. A reporter
friend of Swagger's has discovered her in an old Russian picture
magazine, and he gets involved with her in trying to find out what
became of her, as she simply disappears in the middle of the war. The
story moves to the Ukraine, to battling partisans and the Nazi SS,
and out of that grows a connection to a more modern story, of
plutonium making its way around the world.

Hunter evokes The
Terminator in his epigraph, and sees the story as Swagger reaching
out to the White Witch across time, but truthfully that is the least
convincing part of the story.

Our aging hero has
picked himself up out of his country retreat enough times; his family
has been understanding beyond the call; his endurance is remarkable.
And when it's done over a crush, or a feeling of professional respect
across genders, somehow it falls short as motivation. But the story
moves well, Hunter does manage to ratchet the suspense in both time
lines, and there is a twist which works on a sentimental level,
though it seems almost as unlikely as a similar one in Steig Larsson.
You'll see, because if you like Hunter's work you will read it. Bill
Clinton arrived in London once carrying one of Hunter's novels as he
got off the plane; I sold a review to the Telegraph based on the
photos of that arrival. I was already hooked on the writer, it should
need less than a president to hook you too.

Sunday, 24 January 2016

The
outpouring of reaction to David Bowie's death surprised me, though it
probably should not have. The papers gave it somewhat less space than
George Harrison received (front page stories, full page obits), but
if anything far more columnists and feature writers tripped over each
other to give their own versions of his universal importance to them.
I discussed this briefly on the Americarnage podcast (show 203 at
americarnage.co.uk) but it's worth a deeper examination.

It's
in the adolescent/teen years that music has its deepest hold on most
people, and that music stays with them all their lives. The
columnists and other opinion makers now are of a generation that grew
up with Bowie, in the Seventies, rather than the Fifties and Sixties
music I reference so often, which was the music of the columnists and
editors when Harrison died.

But
that didn't explain the emotional impact, beyond the media. One
friend of mine, who hit her teens in the early seventies, told me
yesterday she burst into tears when she heard the news and was crying
all through the day-- and this chimed with the response that inspired
my first reaction, as I said on Americarnage, which was to consider
what made Bowie so meaningful to them, while it was nothing of import
to me.

The
music I grew up with was directed outward. It was aimed at trying to
navigate and solve and fight through the problems kids encountered
growing up. Originally much of it was being written by adults aimed
at kids. But even as the younger generation took over the production,
even at its rebellious peak, it was music aimed at coping with the
world outside, and maybe changing it, of coping with the ways it
would come down on you.

David
Bowie's music was doing something different: it was dealing with
equipping the vulnerable self to cope with the vicissitudes of that
world by escaping it. Bowie's music encompassed the showmanship of adopting new
identities, many of them extra-terrestrial, showing there were ways
of creating a new you with whom you might feel more comfortable
regardless of what was going on outside your room. It was a way of
protecting yourself against the ways the world came down on you. It
also suggested freedoms to be different from the world well beyond
those of the generation before.

It
wasn't the music per se. Many commentators wanted to cast Bowie as a
revolutionary or innovator musically, but he really wasn't, and that wasn't where his
influence lay. My friend Cynthia Rose, for whom I wrote at City
Limits some 30 years ago, dug up an interview with Bowie she did in
1983, and she said in its introduction that 'when he achieved profundity it almost always
occurred by accident or as a result of his long, usually
misunderstood, relationships with three major sources: Lou Reed, Iggy
Pop and Robert Fripp.' This is not to minimise his talent (though I'd add Brian Eno to that list of his influences); he made
pop songs with catchy hooks and often fantastical themes; as an example of that, he gave Mott the Hoople their best
song (the only one I ever paid any attention to); and he had a distinct flair for the dramatic tied to a moment in time. Even his final, darkest record was timed to his own passing. When he
did the words for Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays's 'This Is Not America',
a song I listen to often, given that I live in Britain, he sung them
with his voice that was actually most effective in the lower
registers, and gave the song an uncertainty and depth that the lyrics
don't immediately suggest, and which Pat Metheny Group's own
versions, while often more attractive instrumentally, often lack.

I
said on Americarnage that Bowie's influence lay in the adoption of
identities, and Cynthia made an interesting point, comparing him to
dandies and pointing out how the original dandies, who confronted
society, mutated into the Noel Coward or Cole Porter versions, 'men
who sought to sell the world placebos for its deepest
needs...demonstrating that the displaced self could celebrate, rather
than solve, its losses.' She pointed out how he was 'merchandising
other people's 'explorations of the isolated heart and mind',
offering 'conceits of style' because he was, at heart,
'conventional'. And remember, Cynthia wrote that more than 30 years
ago.

It
chimes with what I said on Americarnage, and the range of Bowie's
work, particularly outside the music world, reinforces that. He did
telling, though not transcendent, work outside music, in a way moving
with the times but also moving on from image-oriented music into
fields where he could play with that image and often work against it.

Where
Bowie's influence might well have been greatest is in the people who
followed and borrowed from him. What is Madonna, after all, if not a
David Bowie for the next generation, and there is a major essay to be
written on the way she provided girls with a female equivalent of the
androgynous male with whom they could identify their angst. I think
of George Clinton, Parliament and Funkadelic, as a sort of ironic
parody of this, all Mothership and Garry Shider in diapers, with more than a hint of suggestion to the audience
to question the placebo they're being handed. Maybe they were the way
my generation could interpret Bowie.

Perhaps
it's all just generation gapping in the end, perhaps it's just my being a
curmudgeon not getting what the next generation gets instinctively.
It's an almost inevitable progression, though, from the adoption of a
new form of music to the adoption of new identities on stage, to the
acting out of science fiction and the emperor's new clothes on stage.
But that's not what he was being mourned for. Maybe combining Iggy Pop and Robert Heinlein was an innovation, but it was his understanding of alienation that lay behind what was covered up by the glitter; that was Bowie's real
achievement, and what brought so many people to
honest tears when he died.

Sunday, 3 January 2016

My favourite book of
2015 was Kevin Jackson's Constellation Of Genius, which was
published in 2012 but being me I only caught up to it this summer. It's
subtitled 1922: Modernism And All That Jazz and it is
basically a diary of a year which Jackson says was the start of a new
age. Or rather, Ezra Pound said it, calling it year one 'post
scriptum Ulixi' or after the writing of Ulysses. Of course, Pound's
new
epoch soon was subsumed in his enthusiasm for Mussolini, but
that's a different constellation. In his introduction Jackson
acknowledges that what we think of as modernism actually arises over
a period of time that begins nearly two decades earlier, but his view
is predominantly literary, and predominantly Anglo-centric, and 1922
therefore makes sense, bracketed as it were by James Joyce's Ulysses and
T.S. Eliot's Waste Land. 1922 was also the year William Carlos Williams published Spring And All, revolutionary in its own way, but it passes without notice here.

But the book is not
designed as an argument; it is an unfolding of a year presented as an
outflowing of ideas, and as such becomes a joy to follow. It created
a dilemma for me as a reader: did I keep it handy to simply dip into
bit by bit, entranced by its surprises and welcoming its invitations
to make connections and consider our perceptions of art, or should I
just surrender to the momentum of the calendar, and read along in a
flurry of excitement? How many books do you read these days that
create excitement? The same sort that reading Ulysses
for the first time did, or Hemingway's In Our Time, which
remains to me his finest work (along with some of the other early
stories).

Not that these were
being read widely in 1922. Having grown up studying
them, seen them as if displayed behind perspex, we forget the nature
of the world they started to overturn. That is why I said
Anglo-centric, even though Joyce is Irish and Eliot and Pound
are American. Here's a home-grown English modernist, Virginia Woolf, as
quoted by Jackson, about Ulysses:

“and Tom
[Eliot} great Tom, thinks it on a par with War And Peace! An
illiterate, underbred book, it seems to me: the book of a self-taught
working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how
egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating. When
one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you
are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood”

This
puts the problems of literary modernism into a nutshell. Growing up
in the Sixties, in America, my perception of Eliot was coloured by
his bastard offspring, the 'New Critics', and the coded
interpretations of modern reference that entailed, their clinging on to the elitism of a sort of upper-middle class experimentation. I mentioned William Carlos Williams' 1922 book going unmentioned here; Williams himself noted, when he read The Waste Land it 'set me back twenty years'.

In my upbringing, the world of Elliott and Woolf was
being overturned by the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets (though
Charles Olson's personal mythology needed as many footnotes as
Eliot's) and a new freedom of language and, yes, raw expression. Eliot
seemed a Yank who had gone 'over there' and not come back, as Frost
or Hemingway or Cummings had; moreover he had adapted the protective
colouration of the old world, a reversal of classic American 'going native'. Yet to those whose colouration he adopted, the raw savages were 'self-taught working men'. But it was amazing to me, when I moved to
Britain in the late Seventies, to discover how important Eliot was
still to the older generation of artists, how liberating his work,
which I considered constricted, actually had been, and still was to them, and I revisited it through a new perspective as a result.

In light of this, Ezra Pound, whose influence wound up being far greater in America, and who is in many ways the central figure in Jackson's book,
gets short shift. He was the mover and shaker in the literary world of
London and Paris, but more important, and what doesn't receive notice
here, is the way Pound absolutely transformed The Waste Land. His editing
on it was immense and made it something it would not have been
otherwise, a challenge to both language and formal constraint. The line from Eliot through the Imagists to the poets I
mentioned earlier, proceeds directly through Pound, and I would argue only because of
him.

But
as I said, this is not a book of argument, it is one of connection.
And as I followed its progress through the year, I thought of the
photos of the great artistic experimenters of that era, the
bohemians, the surrealists, the modernists, and how they are always
posed formally, in their suits and collars, or at least neckties; how
this was a world whose boundaries they were knocking down while still
remaining at least on the surface tied to them. I wish Jackson might
have included more about actual jazz, though I'm not convinced 1922
is a crucial year. I reviewed once, for the Spectator, Philip
Larkin's writings on jazz; it occurred to me that his adulation of
the early twenties and Louis Armstrong, and his ultimate disdain for
almost everything that followed, was a form of fetishism for the
liberating sense that music brought him in his youth, a freedom from the strictures of his upbringing.

And
that was what I kept coming back to, how revealing this book is about
the world that was being changed or at least challenged by modernism.
Again, I call on Woolf, commenting on the death of Kitty Maxse,
thought of as the model for Mrs. Dalloway, who fell down a flight of
stairs. 'Still it seems a pity Kitty did kill herself: but of course
she was an awful snob'. Ms. Pot does not seem very modernist at all. I may have connected with Constellation Of
Genius because it took me back, as much to the England which I
encountered in 1977 as it did to 1922, an England that was in many ways far closer to the world 50 years earlier than it is to a world only 40 years later. The book sits by my bedside still, and I still dip
into it. The best of both worlds. Again, how many books rate such a position?

Friday, 1 January 2016

Cooking pancakes for Nate this New Year's morning, and right after giving me 'pinch, punch first of the month', he asks me 'when we die, the world won't remember us, will they?' So I explain to him about the few people who might be, at least in the short term, remembered, and the fewer who will be remembered longer, not necessarily for good. Then I told him that we all have worlds we make around ourselves, where we will be remembered, even when the things, like books and poems and articles and show tapes and blogs, have disappeared. And in one of those places, someday, he will tell his children about their grandad they may have never met, and maybe tell them how he learned to make pancakes from me. And he said 'never mind, dad'....